“After Landscape: Perspectives and Traces of the Traveler”

In picturing a landscape, what ends are served? What role does landscape play in the act of contemplation, exploration, and evaluation? Why and how could the historical revision and decolonization of landscape be fruitful? Could the experience and exercise of landscape be decolonizing in themselves? This and other questions will be addressed in “After Landscape,” the fifth edition of the annual Seminario Fundación Cisneros. This seminar will explore forms of cultural visualization: why, how, by and for whom particular lands have been depicted. Whether considered an art genre or experienced as part of a field expedition, landscape is addressed in this seminar from the perspective of the traveler; of the visitor. The foreigner is also at times not subject but object: a hovering satellite or a flying drone.

In an all-day conference, this seminar will feature lectures by T.J. Demos, Maria Elena Ramos, Rafael Romero, Graciela Silvestri, and Felix Suazo. Departing from analysis of landscape as an art genre, each of these lecturers focus on particular artistic practices and time periods, covering centuries-long scientific expeditions to modern national identity programs to contemporary activism. The seminar also includes presentations by artists Juan Araujo, Dulce Gomez, and Roberto Mata, as well as curators Catalina Lozano, Tahía Rivero and José Roca. Visual artist Carolina Caycedo and musician Luis Julio Toro contribute with new performances. Their participation focuses on drawing from landscape to locate its political nature. Additionally, there will be a public conversation between the poet Natasha Tiniacos and renowned historian Elias Pino Iturrieta, co-editor of La mirada del otro: Viajeros extranjeros en la Venezuela del siglo XIX and author of numerous books. “After Landscape” is organized by Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy, curator of contemporary art at Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros.

As in past years, the seminar inspires parallel programming that involves institutional collaborations and engages diverse communities in Caracas and beyond. At three separate moments during the conference, there will be video screenings of a selection of works drawn from the CPPC’s contemporary art collection produced between 2000 to 2014. This includes work by Adrián Balseca, Donna Conlon and Jonathan Harker, Jorge Dominguez Dubuc, Camilo Echavarria, Suwon Lee, and Cinthia Marcelle.

Several events and public programs have been organized in conjunction with the seminar:

“Values and tactics in a changing landscape”​ by Catalina Lozano is a workshop designed for artists will interpret landscape as a field of opportunities.

Ciclo Cine a cielo abierto (Open Air film cycle) is a film series organized in collaboration with Centro de Arte Los Galpones that reflects on the topic of landscape through the genre of road-trip films, with movies from Latin America featuring rarely depicted routes and vistas of our times: La maleta Mexicana (Mexican suitcase) (Trisha Ziff, 2011), La jaula de oro (Golden cage) (Diego Quemada-Díez, 2013), and Las acacias (Acacias) (Pablo Giorgelli, 2011).

Backroom/Backdrops, organized by Backroom Caracas, is a set of artist-made backdrops, that will be temporarily set up to produce an exhibition of portraits in social networks, exploring circulation and displacement through the “been there” asserted in landscape imagery. The exhibition is meant as a situation, and its display as image is meant to circulate and be experienced as audience-produced selfies and suchlike pictures on social networks like Instagram. Participating artists are: Marco Montiel, Amanda Granado, Flavio Herrera, Ricardo Huezo, Nancy La Rosa, Marco Montiel-Soto, Romy Pocztaruk, and Gerardo Rojas.

All of the programs in “After Landscape” are open to the general public and free of charge; prior registration is required. Admission to the workshop is through an application and selection process (details on the website). As with previous editions of the Seminario Fundación Cisneros, “After Landscape” can be accessed from anywhere online. The conference will be live-streamed from CPPC’s website.

The complete program schedule and venue information, as well as video documentation of all seminars to date, including biographies of all of the participants and briefs on their presentations, may also be found on CPPC’s website.

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